Teachers’ Psychological Difficulties in Online Teaching: Research in some Middle and High Schools in the North and South of Vietnam

Abstract

In the context of global educational digital transformation and the widespread shift to online teaching, teachers’ mental health has become a critical concern in both developed and developing countries. This study presents the research results on teachers’ psychological difficulties in online teaching at some middle and high schools in the North and South of Vietnam. The goal of the study is to explore the manifestations and factors affecting teachers’ psychological difficulties in a digital environment. Research results show that nearly 90% of the teachers faced psychological difficulties during online teaching. Psychological difficulties manifest in all three aspects: cognitive difficulties; emotional and behavioral difficulties. The findings indicated that 42.7% of the teachers experienced anxiety, 32.6% reported depressive symptoms, and nearly one quarter showed stress-related difficulties. There are subjective and objective factors that cause psychological difficulties in teachers during online teaching. Particularly, subjective factors have a stronger impact than objective factors. Among the factors affecting teachers’ psychological difficulties in online teaching, namely the level of stress, limitations in teachers’ online teaching competency; students’ poor sense of learning; self-assessment of the teacher’s difficulties in online teaching; network infrastructure for online teaching; overloading teaching content; teaching experience are the main and significant factors. Thus, from the perspective of digital transformation in education, it is clear that the internet infrastructure, teachers’ adaptive capacity and interaction in digital teaching environments greatly affect the psychological difficulties, even teachers’ mental health. The research results on Vietnamese teachers resonate with previous findings on teachers’ psychological difficulties in the world.